I've got 20GB to fill, so I figure I'll use lossless audio. The Karma supports MP3, WMA, Ogg, and FLAC afaik. Will reading such large files require more HDD activity than say Ogg/MP3? I figure that equates to shorter battery life. Is FLAC meant primarily for compressing audio for decompression at a later date to the pure WAV file? I'm torn between Ogg and FLAC, so your opinions are welcomed.

20GB will be quite easy to fill with lossless. It'll take about 60 albums. Use Ogg Vorbis or MP3, because there're other limitations with portable players imposed by the hardware quality (DAC, headphones, ...) which come into effect sooner than lossy algorithms do. A portable is not about extreme quality or achiving, it's about convenience. I have a 200GB drive dedicated for music storage and I think it's too small for lossless music.

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The object of mankind lies in its highest individuals.One must have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star.

I have a 200GB drive dedicated for music storage and I think it's too small for lossless music.

Really? What size are you targetting then for such a dedicated drive? I was thinking about doing the same thing: archiving my collection lossless and coding to MP3, AAC, OGG, future formats... when I would need it.

I just got an MP3 CD Player for my car, not quite the same, but similar listenting conditions (i.e. potential background noise, lack of real attention to the music, etc.). I'm converting FLAC files to MP3 at --alt-preset medium as it seemed about the right tradeoff between quality and filesize. That's about 5000 songs on your 20gb hard drive.

Edit: You could also consider Vorbis at ~Q5 (although I'm not really sure on average Vorbis bitrates)

The flac it a little odd. To me the best reason for flac on a portable is recording for later transcription to CD or archival storage... but the Karma doesn't record. Perhaps they (the rio empeg group) already had the code done for one of their older products with a similar processor.

Ok, can I get some opinions on bitrate for Ogg for a portable? I had been doing 256, but here I have seen people recommend from as low as 100 to 224.

Vorbis Ogg is developed to be VBR codec. So use -q values. LAME APS for Ogg Vorbis lays somewhere between GT3b1 q5.0-q5.5. But it sounds very good with ver. 1.0.1 at q3. You can use GT3b1 q5.0-5,5 for archiving and ver. 1.0.1 q2-4 for portable use (find out q value for portable by yourself) and never use CBR with Ogg Vorbis.

This post has been edited by de Mon: Dec 26 2003, 23:12

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Ogg Vorbis for music and speech [q-2.0 - q6.0]FLAC for recordings to be editedSpeex for speech

I have a 200GB drive dedicated for music storage and I think it's too small for lossless music.

Agreed. Too small for lossless if you have a medium size collection. That's about 500-600 CD's. I need more than that. On the other hand, if you don't intend to have your entire collection online, then it might be more than enough.

20GB will be quite easy to fill with lossless. It'll take about 60 albums. Use Ogg Vorbis or MP3, because there're other limitations with portable players imposed by the hardware quality (DAC, headphones, ...) which come into effect sooner than lossy algorithms do. A portable is not about extreme quality or achiving, it's about convenience. I have a 200GB drive dedicated for music storage and I think it's too small for lossless music.

My CD collection is now well over 500 albums. However, I don't need all 500 with me all the time. I think 60 albums is pleanty to keep me happy, especially with the peace of mind of lossless sound. I plan on buying the Karma and using flac for this reason.

I recently ripped my entire collection to FLAC. It is only about 150CDs. I did it mostly for archival purposes, however I now have a Squeezebox and get to use the FLAC with it.

However I do have a Nomad, so I need mp3 format for it. So instead of reripping everything, or manually using some GUI program to transcode all my music and transfer the metadata, I wrote a perl script to convert my FLAC to mp3 using flac decoder and lame. It works rather well and it takes about 2 days to transcode all my music ~2000 titles on an Athlon 900 with 512MB RAM.

This give me the best of both worlds, FLAC for lossless and MP3 for portablility. Cool thing with a lossless format I can easilly modifiy my script to work with any encoding format I like.

Thank you for contacting Rio. Yes, the Karma should play all types of WMA files. If you have any further questions or need assistance please feel free to email again or call our customer service at 1-800-468-5846.

Regards-

Aaron K Rio Email Support customersupport@rioaudio.com

Can anyone confirm that the Rio Karma with play WMA9 Pro and Lossless files? is this the first Hardware support for WM9 Pro and Lossless?